Around the middle of last year, Huawei had introduced the Ideos Pro smartphone . A neat looking phone with a set of decent features but a tad high on price. The company recently introduced the successor to the device in the form of the Ideos X5 Pro .

Behold the impressive Huawei IDEOS X5. It's not the fastest Android phone, doesn't have a fancy customised interface, and runs on a single-core CPU. So why do we care? Thank you for searching out Geare Magazine's equipment review of the Huawei ideos x5 Phone review originally published in Geare Jan...

I'm confused. On the one hand we have Vodafone pimping the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android 2.1 phone hobbled with Samsung's custom interface. On the other hand (in my actual hand), I have the IDEOS X5 from 2Degrees . It runs the all-but-latest Android 2.2, with almost identical specs to the Samsung.

Chances are, if you have had a broadband dongle in the past then it may have been made by Huawei. Having built a rock solid foundation with 3G dongles over the years Huawei are sailing, full steam, into the mobile phone world. Much like HTC did, years ago.

The Huawei U8800 IDEOS X5 is one of the Huawei devices launched in India in December 2010 and it arrived to a full fanfare reception. Running on Android 2.2, the Huawei IDEOS X5 is a smartphone. It measures 11.6x120x62mm and weighs 130g, which is pretty heavy, even for a smartphone.

In India, the IDEOS X5 is priced at Rs 14,999 while in US, it is priced at ￡200. The US launch and pricing aren't still made official. Ideos X5 can virtually do everything you expect from an Android (2.2) smartphone, be it the Wifi Hotspot, or 720p HD video recording or running Flash.

The Huawei IDEOS X5 was, and still is, the cheapest device around with such amazing specs. I mean you can pick up this device for just under $300 at your local Crazy John's and you'll get virtually the same specs as an HTC Desire Z minus the $500 price tag.

Cheap; Fairly fast; Android 2.2 (Vanilla; 720p video recording

A little bit bulky; Capacitive buttons

Chances are, if you have had a broadband dongle in the past then it may have been made by Huawei. Having built a rock solid foundation with 3G dongles over the years Huawei are sailing, full steam, into the mobile phone world. Much like HTC did, years ago.